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Azure Storage accounts

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Media Services logo v3

Warning

Azure Media Services will be retired June 30th, 2024. For more information, see the AMS Retirement Guide.

When you create a Media Services account, a storage account will be attached to it. When you create a Media Services account in the portal, storage account creation is part of the process. When you create a Media Services account with other methods, you have to create the storage account seperately, then attach it to the Media Services account.

Assets in a storage account

In Media Services v3, the Storage APIs are used to upload files into assets. For more information about Assets, see Assets in Azure Media Services v3.

Required storage account types and limits

You must have one Primary storage account and you can have any number of Secondary storage accounts associated with your Media Services account. Media Services supports General-purpose v2 (GPv2) or General-purpose v1 (GPv1) accounts only. Azure Data Lake Gen2 or blob only accounts aren't allowed to be used as Primary or Secondary.

We recommend that you use General-purpose v2, so you can take advantage of the latest features and performance. To learn more about storage account types, see Azure Storage account overview.

Azure Data Lake Gen2 storage is not supported by Media Services. To ingest content from a storage account using hierarchical namespace support, you must submit encoding jobs using SAS URLs and the JobInputHttp feature in Media Services.

Note

It is recommended to use the hot storage tier when streaming assets for live or VOD. Cool storage can be used for encoding jobs and long term storage of assets that are not actively being streamed, but keep in mind the higher costs of reading from cool storage if you plan to do a lot of reads on content. One strategy can be to move your master/mezzanine source assets into a secondary storage account that is configured as cool storage to reduce the long term costs of retention on your source files, and output your encoded files for streaming into a storage account configured for hot storage.

There are different SKUs you can choose for your storage account. If you want to experiment with storage accounts, use --sku Standard_LRS. However, when picking a SKU for production, you should consider --sku Standard_RAGRS, which provides geographic replication for business continuity.

Usage of cross-subscription storage accounts

Note

When Media Services is configured to use Managed Identity to access storage, Media Services can use any storage account that the Managed Identity can access.

When using System authentication to storage, the storage account must be in the same subscription as the Media Services account. Use storage accounts in the same region as the Media Services account to avoid additional data egress costs.

For both authentication types, the principal that creates or updates the Media Services account must have the 'Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/listkeys/action' permission over the storage account.

How-Tos and Tutorials

Get help and support

You can contact Media Services with questions or follow our updates by one of the following methods: